It’s just like Black Mirror to take a happy ending and twist it into a nightmare. “USS Callister,” the Emmy-winning fourth-season Black Mirror episode, ended on an uncharacteristically uplifting note. But a new film-length sequel, “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” plunges its characters back into a dystopian hell that feels even more resonant in 2025 than when the original premiered in 2017.
That episode featured Jesse Plemons as Robert Daly, a programming genius and incel who feels disrespected at his own video game company by both his colleagues and his attention-grabbing partner Walton (Jimmi Simpson). Daly takes his frustrations out on his workmates by stealing their DNA and imprisoning their cloned avatars in his private virtual game world. Here he can humiliate and sadistically punish his colleagues turned lackeys, who serve as the crew of the retro spaceship USS Callister—a scenario modeled on Daly’s childhood favorite Star Trek–ish TV series, Space Fleet.
Every evening after coming home from the office, Plemons reigns as Captain Daly, a demonic twist on Captain Kirk, whose every wish must be obeyed for fear of torture. When the cloned version of quiet coder Nanette (Cristin Milioti) refuses him, Daly seals up her face so that she can’t talk back or breathe.
Daly is the embodiment of arrested development, fandom gone berserk. But it is the equally nerdy Nanette—in the real world, she coos admiringly over Daly’s sublime programming architecture—who figures out how to escape the private server in which USS Callister is trapped and steer the spaceship into the full multiplayer game. It’s a triumph of female ingenuity over male malice. But Black Mirror couldn’t just let it be.
“USS Callister: Into Infinity” finds Nanette still on deck. Daly may be permanently banished from his virtual creation, but she and the crew are increasingly exhausted by a new set of digital dangers—among them, the game’s 30 million players. “When we were trapped on Daly’s computer, we only had to deal with one sociopath,” Nanette complains. “Now, we’ve got a whole universe full of them.” They’re also forced to rob players in order to get enough in-game currency to keep the spaceship afloat. Call it a “cost-of-existing crisis,” quips Elena (Milanka Brooks), the receptionist turned blue-skinned crew member. The gang’s one form of relaxation is watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta, which somehow they can access for free.
Meanwhile, real-life Nanette stumbles upon clues to what’s been going on and convinces Walton to enter the game with her, bringing them face to face with their alter egos. “I look so capable,” the real Nanette marvels on encountering her formidable spaceship doppelgänger. “You being shocked by that does us both a disservice,” space-Nanette scolds. Like Severance, the episode plays with our ideas of consciousness and selfhood. Is the digital clone of Nanette (her “innie,” in Severance parlance) a real person? Do her virtual-world feelings and pain count for as much as her fleshy counterpart’s? Is it possible for Walton to be an asshole in reality and a mensch inside the game?
Some ethical lines have already been drawn in the Black Mirror universe: The cloning technology, apparently created by the porn industry to make virtual fuckbuddies, has been legally banned. But in our real world, AI’s growth spurt has combined with the malign rise of tech broligarchs, heralding a sinister future. The gap between Black Mirror’s chilling visions and present realities feels like it’s shrinking every day. And at a moment when some members of American society are being framed as more disposable than others, this episode hits a nerve. A little too obviously sometimes, as when outie Walton enters the game and starts shooting at his cloned employees—calling them “illegal” because they haven’t paid for game subscriptions.
One of the most unsettling scenes flashes back to Daly’s origin story, in which he’s been cruelly exploited by Walton. That doesn’t make Daly any less sadistic—but it does make him a little more human. “I’m a nice guy,” his clone repeats over and over to Nanette at one point, just as so many abusive men have promised. “I’m not that guy.” But we already know that he is that guy—or soon will be. Daly utterly lacks empathy, seeing the spaceship crew as Barbie and Ken dolls to be mutilated and discarded.
